Peter and the Wulf
by snowcloud8
Summary: Centuries ago, before Germany was the country it was today, Germania was a rural and dark place. Filled with tales of monsters and magic, the time period was ruled with fear of these beasts. And while they may be bedtime stories to some, many have faced the realities of the stories, discovering that the real beast may lie within. The origin of Wulf from my fiction, Spirited Away.


**Peter and the Wulf**

Centuries ago, before Germany was the country it was today, Germania was a rural and dark place. Those who lived there endured harsh winters and barbaric conditions, living in small village huts and having to wear animal skins to keep warm instead of the luxurious refineries of cloth. Even the Romans had feared of Germania's barbarous landscape until they added it to the Holy Roman Empire. Still, many held caution to the mystic area. This had given the locals opportunities to weave tales of the evils of the forest. Tales of fairy folk that would trick travelers, and mythical and terrible beasts that would most likely kill you just as soon as they looked at you. It was a very cruel world. And while the land eventually outgrew its fear and reliance on these tales as it formed into a steadfast nation, many thinking of them as old wives' tales to keep the children safe, some still believed, feared and respected the supernatural tales. None more so than Peter Stumpf.

Little Peter Stumpf lived just on the outskirts of his quiet village off the river Rhine with his homely mother Helen and his burly father Fenris. Unlike the other boys in the neighborhood, who went to school and played in the village, Peter was homeschooled by his mother and aided his father in hunting and trading furs and meats in town. While the hustle and bustle of the village was exciting, Peter preferred the quiet of the forest, much like his father did. Brought up in the ways of old ways of the hunt, Fenris taught Peter everything he knew about the old woods. How to trust the wind and trees, and look for tell-tale signs of animals nearby, unlocking the secrets to a successful hunt along with teaching him the ancient laws of nature and survival. By doing this, his father strove to make Peter into a strong man that could provide for his family, something that proved useful when the former took sick and perished from influenza ten winters after Peter's birth.

Taking upon the role of the man of the house, Peter sought to provide for his mother and began hunting more as a profession and less of a chore. Still, even with the kills he collected, no one wanted to hire an impoverished boy with no official schooling, so his mother urged him into attending school regularly in order to receive a proper education. Peter wasn't the brightest boy, but he was an excellent and smart hunter. He knew how to track down animals that could not be tracked, capture those that could not be caught, and see what other could not see; it was very rare occurance for any animal to outwit him. Many said he had an animal's mentality, like he knew what the beasts were thinking whenever he hunted. He had very sharp and acute senses, able to listen carefully to the forest like a spirit and had the instincts of a bloodhound. Many in the village had deemed his skill downright "magical," like he was a wolf hunting his prey.

Over time, this skill caused some of the other boys in the village to become jealous of Peter. They had already isolated him because of his strange upbringing and his limited intelligence. Now they had actual cause and motivation to attack him, other than picking on him when they grew bored of their games. He was the smallest and leanest one out of all of the boys in town, but Peter was surefooted and would always be able to escape if he managed to get to the forest, for the village boys were terrified of what lay beyond the woods. There, he sought out the comforting embrace of the forest trees and the pack of hunting dogs his father had left him.

In order to honor his late father, Peter took up the language of his father's people, Esperanto, to command the dogs. Because it was his second language and he was not a learned man, Peter spoke it very brokenly. Many in the village called it a secret language or the language of wolves, for anytime Peter uttered a command to his dogs, it was in this strange tongue that received immediate obedience. The whispers of his mystic ability slowly turned into accusations of "black magic" and "witchcraft."

"Why do you speak in such strange tongues?" one of the boys would ask, sometimes for the sake of curiosity or teasing him. "Dogs understand us in our native language. Why not command them in Germanic tongue? Are you slow?"

"I speak Esperanto in order to not confuse them. With so many people shouting, it helps to command them with foreign words because they are not said in normal conversation. It makes it easier to hunt," Peter always answered.

"Why do you spend so much time hunting? Are you a wolf? Do you need flesh to quench your thirst for blood?" Another would say. Many of the children asked him this, which gradually passed onto their parents, who were already wary of the Stumpf family. Peter had at this point grown into a strapping young man with scruffy black hair, appearing even more ferocious looking than his father before him. But still he held a gentle heart, keeping mostly to himself if not to avoid trouble, but like most humans, he longed for companionship, especially since the pox had taken his mother two and a half winters ago.

One day, some of the villagers became frightened because many of their livestock had been attacked and dragged away by wolves. Because there was less game in the forest, the people were frightened of starving to death and being scavenged by wolves and ravens. Peter saw this as an opportunity to get into the good graces of the village and went out to find and kill the wolves that had been threatening the villagers. That was how it began.

For an entire week, he would hunt and bring back a wolf pelt he and his dogs had caught, only for another chicken to be killed or captured. This process would repeat over and over, but the offender was still at large; it had been almost a month since he started. At this point, many did not care, for now they had food and pelts to keep warm, along with a guardian to protect them from the wolf scourge. Peter the Wolf Slayer, they called him. The arrogance of the title brought him so much pleasure, he began to kill for sport in order to win the village's favor. Sometimes he brought back large spoils of other kills of deer meat and fox pelts, a luxury that was normally impossible to find abundant during the winter months. When the winter cold did hit full swing, the plentiful kills began to diminish, and Peter once again returned to his hunt for the thieving wolf.

By luck, one night, as he went out hunting, he managed to come across a den of wolf pups. Normally, most creatures would not let outsiders get close to their dens, sometimes outsiders being members of their own packs, but because Peter was downwind of them, they did not sense him nearby. If they did, they would only pick up the scent of wolves from his many pelts. It was almost too easy to end their lives with his musket. But before he could raise his cold steel, he noticed the she-wolf had brought a dead pheasant into the burrow for her cubs. The bird identified as one of the many creatures that had been stolen away from the village.

This lone she-wolf was the elusive thief that had been murdering the livestock and poultry. With the end of her life, Peter could bring an end to the wolf's reign over the territory, while effectively putting him out of a job. He contemplated this troubling fact along with why the wolf had attacked his village in the first place. Lately, he had began to notice fewer and fewer animal tracks in the snow, and he thought it unusual that the mother was absent, since mothers never left their pups alone and usually let other members of the pack hunt for her. While it was a possibility the animals had moved further south, it was more likely that he had overhunted the woods and killed most of her pack. With fewer game to hunt, it was only natural for the wolf to provide for her young by resulting to petty thievery. In his arrogance, Peter realized that by killing so many of the game in the woods, it had depleted the amount the wolves could hunt. By allowing his head to become so full of pride, he had forgotten the lessons his father had taught him about the laws of nature.

As Peter began to retreat back into the forest, the wind shifted directions, allowing the she-wolf to catch wind of him, alerting her to his presence. Her piercing blue eyes stared earnestly into Peter's. They both held a stare filled with neither malice nor fear; only the shared stubborn will to survive. The wolf seemed to hold a brief look of understanding with him before she picked up her cubs and took off into the night. It was then Peter knew he must undo the wrongs he had committed.

In order to instill his plan, Peter began to implore the elders of his village of establishing hunting laws to manage the amount of game allowed to be hunted. They already had more than enough stores of wheat and grain to survive the winter, but unfortunately, the village had grown accustomed to Peter's surplus kills and had now grown gluttonous and greed-driven because of it.

"Why do you get to make all the rules, Peter? Do you speak for the wolves?" asked one villager.

"They only attack us because they have to. There is no game for them to hunt," Peter defended.

"Then let them starve. By restricting the amount of game we hunt, they will soon grow and flourish so that more are to be killed by the wolf, this time going after family and friends instead of livestock," said one of his scornful past tormenters, who had grown jealous of Peter's skill. "They are cold-blooded killers, and anyone who says otherwise will sooner join them to rot in the dirt. Why don't you join them, Peter? You seem to be well acquainted with their ways."

Dejected that the council had refused his actions, Peter was, once again, left alone in the woods, a pariah from his own people with only his dogs for company. By some miracle, one of female dogs had bred with one of few male wolves left, probably from the litter he stumbled upon last winter, producing an excellent generation of wolf-dog hybrids that were both faster, bigger, and stronger than the dogs his late father had raised before.

With the addition of the newly threatening hybrids, the townspeople began to grow in anxious of Peter's new hunting team. If the forests weren't picked clean before, they certainly were going to be now. However, this time, instead of hunting animals like the villagers had thought, Peter began hunting people, more specifically, hunters, only this he did alone without the aid of his dogs. He would sabatoge traps, make loud noises to frighten away the beasts, he even marked the trees with the scent of apex predators to drive out all the game. Eventually, the townspeople had had enough with Peter's meddling.

"Why does he help them?"

"He must be one of them, disguised as one of us!"

"He's even begun raising some of them as his own!"

"Wicked, the whole lot of them!"

Despite the accusations, Peter never sought out to hurt anyone but the meat he had hunted for food. One day, there was a loud uproar from the village. A series of murders of children slew in the night had been accumulating, large gashes being found on their chests and throats, their innards ripped out and dragged onto the ground. Many wondered what manner of beast that could do such horror. The only way of tracking it was through the large paw prints left behind, ones that led to Peter's cabin in the woods.

They had first put the initial blame towards Peter's dogs, but Peter argued with the fact that his dogs only knew Esperanto and would not kill without his command. This made them shift the blame onto Peter for causing the murder by sending his wolf-dogs after the children. Since the village had no proof, they left him alone, but not before slaying his best hunting dogs for security. Left with the grief of his lost companions, Peter mourned silently of their deaths and tried to put the incident behind him, since it was for the greater good. That is until the latest incident had the town raving mad. It involved a young boy that had been attacked and dragged away screaming in the night by what appeared to be a large animal.

Because Peter lived so far out in the woods, word did not get to him about the murders until the neighbors were at his door. Much to his horror, the trail of blood of the recent victim ran all the way to his doorstep, where the child was laid out with his throat slashed. Because Peter had been working with some meat earlier, he was covered in animal blood.

"Murderer! You've been caught red handed!" cried one of his accusers.

"He must don one of his wolf pelts to become one of them in the night. He means to slay us all!" shouted another.

"Blasphemy!"

"Vile demon!"

"Pagan witch!"

"Werewolf!"

"Monster!"

It was then that the people had forcefully apprehended Peter Stumpf and put him on trial. They harshly interrogated him and had poor Peter stretched out and pleading on a rack, a medieval and horrid device leftover from the dark times. It was from sheer pain and agony from the torture machine that he finally blubbered out his false confession, if anything to get them to stop, indefinitely condemning himself to death by being burned at the stake, bound by his own wolf pelts.

Sitting in his cell the night before the execution, Peter found himself questioning if he really was the monster the other's claimed him to be. If that was the case, maybe he should be cast into hellfire, if not to ensure safety of innocents, and escape from the world that did not understand him.

His executioners were ironically the very children that had bullied Peter as a young lad, now grown into strong young men and cunning adults. As they gagged and bound him to the pyre, they whispered of their evil plot to him, stating how easy it was to get the village to turn against its hero. How smothering a few children in the night and then slashing their throats and bellies had made it so easy to fool everyone into thinking Peter was a murderer. Originally, they had planned on blaming the dogs and having him slain with them as their ring leader, but adding the werewolf bit had sealed his fate, for anyone who was a werewolf was never aware of it. And all it took was luring a few dogs of his dogs to the attack sites with a little Esperanto they had picked up from his encounters.

For once in his life, Peter was absolutely furious. He had done nothing to deserve this, to deserve ANY of this! All he had wanted was peace. A peaceful life with people to call friends and a place to call home. Why did they do this to him? Why did they turn against him? How could they-? HOW COULD THEY!

His anger burned bright with the flames that now licked at his skin, almost fueling the fire like kerosene as he thrashed violently at his bindings, startling the onlookers of his execution. His muffled cries of rage became mad whimpers and howls of agony, frightening and convincing those who had perceived him as an evil beast before he gradually stopped struggling and passed on, transcending into the world of spirits known as the Ghost Zone. Left with a charred, disfigured appearance, his anger was the only thing that continued to burn onward, like an eternal flame, as green ectoplasm gathered around him, molding him into his new shape and form.

 _They called me wolf, they called me monster... Very well then, so be it._

From the curling of smoke and flames of life giving ectoplasm, the anguished spirit turned wolf-like in appearance. His black hair turned to fur, his piercing blue eyes turned a ghostly green, tinted with red fury as long green claws grew out of the man's hands and feet, morphing him into a bipedal wolf creature. Using these newfound tools, he clawed his way out of the ghostly dimension by ripping open a portal to his village, an ability he just now learned to do, to wreak havoc upon his tormenters. Blind rage and bloodshed was born out of this hatred. By the end of his raid, the remnants of those who had accused and defamed him in village remained as nothing but crumpled piles of flesh and bone. It was nature's law. Only the strongest survive, and they were not strong.

To this day, he could still hear the screaming. The wails of fear, the cries of pain and begging for mercy, the images of him tearing the flesh from their bones. They were etched very plainly into his memory, which grew dull over time, but still remained as the faintest of scars. He had learned to put this past him. Peter Stumpf was dead. Only the Wulf lived in his stead.

* * *

 **Wow, this was really fun to right, but since it was a ghost tale, it turned dark really quickly. My basis for making this story was a combination of Peter and the Wolf, "Who Speaks for the Wolf" (a Native American tale), Big Top Scooby Doo, and the actual true accounts of a werewolf trial over serial killer Peter Stumpf, the werewolf of Bedburg.**

 **I wanted there to be an origin story about Wulf without there actually being a real werewolf, but I had you going there for a while. I hope you lot enjoyed my headcanon and please feel free to check out my story, "Spirited Away."**


End file.
